by E. Samuels
Might things have been different for the people in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere if they had had a means to defend themselves?
And where is the Democratic Party's passion to stop the real killer threatening each and every person's family - 100,000 drug deaths a year?
The numbers for deaths by guns and the numbers of deaths by drugs might need revising since it is unclear how many deaths (of others and by suicide) which have been attributed to guns should more accurately have been attributed to the drugs which "triggered" them.
The Democratic Party frequently criticizes opponents for being pro-gun, seeming not to realize that being "pro-gun" means simply respecting the Second Amendment of the Constitution. But if the founding fathers making certain that the American populace had the right to bear arms as protection against a tyrannical government is insufficient for rethinking its gun control stance, the Democratic Party might be interested to know that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, one of the world's most committed believers in non-violence, said that taking away people's guns was the worst thing the British did to India.
The Democratic Party does not point to 41,000+ deaths a year from cars as cause to ban them nor suggest that just in owning them, a person should be thought of as violent, criminal or racist.
Given the concern of framers of the Constitution that a second amendment was needed to protect the people from their own government, perhaps it might be instructive, to look at what the figures for government-on-people violence were during the same time (by guns and otherwise) in which "gun-control" was in effect.
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." -- Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography OR The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi)
In 1999, there were 28,874 gun-related deaths in the United States - over 80 deaths every day. Of those, more than half were from suicide, which means that less than 14,000 people a year die from gun violence as we tend to think of it.
There were an estimated 6,289,000 car accidents in the US in 1999. There were about 3.4 million injuries and 41,611 people killed in auto accidents in 1999. 114 people a day die from auto accidents which is 1.4 times more than die from guns but the Democratic Party isn't billing itself as anti-car. Why not?
More than 100,000 people a year die from the pharmaceutical industry's prescription drugs (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998), far exceeding the number of people killed by car and guns. 2.4 times as many people die from drugs as die from car accidents (114).
And more than 7 times as many people die from drugs (274 people a day) as die from guns (80) .
Shouldn't the Democratic Party be especially concerned about drugs since they are one of the leading causes of death in the US, and are being caused by a criminal pharmaceutical industry that is associated with Republicans, GHW Bush, and George Bush , to say nothing of literal Nazis.
To give some perspective on being pro-gun control, Hitler was." He removed all weapons in private hands.
Did Hitler's cutting down person-on-person gun violence by removing guns help in reducing deaths and create a less violent country (something Democrats seek to attain)?
The exact number of people killed by the Nazi regime may never be known, but scholars, using a variety of methods of determining the death toll, have generally agreed upon common range of the number of victims. Recently declassified British and Soviet documents have indicated the total may be somewhat higher than previously believed[20]. However, the following estimates are considered to be highly reliable. The estimates:
5.1–6.0 million Jews, including 3.0–3.5 million Polish Jews1.8 –1.9 million non-Jewish Poles (includes all those killed in executions or those that died in prisons, labor, and concentration camps, as well as civilians killed in the 1939 invasion and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising)500,000–1.2 million Serbs killed by Croat Nazis200,000–800,000 Roma & Sinti200,000–300,000 people with disabilities80,000–200,000 Freemasons [23]100,000 communists10,000–25,000 homosexual men2,000 Jehovah's WitnessesRaul Hilberg, in the third edition of his ground-breaking three-volume work, The Destruction of the European Jews, estimates that 5.1 million Jews died during the Holocaust. This figure includes "over 800,000" who died from "Ghettoization and general privation;" 1,400,000 who were killed in "Open-air shootings;" and "up to 2,900,000" who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll in Poland at "up to 3,000,000."[24] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they generally include only those deaths for which some records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[25] British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.[26]
Map titled "Jewish Executions Carried Out by Einsatzgruppe A" from the December 1941 Jäger Report by the commander of a Nazi death squad. Marked "Secret Reich Matter," the map shows the number of Jews shot in the Baltic region, and reads at the bottom: "the estimated number of Jews still on hand is 128,000". Estonia is marked as judenfrei ("free of Jews").Lucy Davidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died. Using official census counts may cause an underestimate since many births and deaths were not recorded in small towns and villages. Another reason some consider her estimate too low is that many records were destroyed during the war. Her listing of deaths by country is available in the article about her book, The War Against the Jews.[27]
One of the most authoritative German scholars of the Holocaust, Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin, cites between 5.3 and 6.2 million Jews killed in Dimension des Volksmords (1991), while Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett estimate between 5.59 and 5.86 million Jewish victims in their Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990).[28]
The following groups of people were also killed by the Nazi regime, but there is little evidence that the Nazis planned to systematically target them for genocide as was the case for the groups above.
3.5–6 million other Slavic civilians
2.5–4 million Soviet POWs
1–1.5 million political dissidents
Additionally, the Nazis' allies, the Ustaša regime in Croatia conducted its own campaign of mass extermination against the Serbs in the areas which it controlled, resulting in the deaths of at least 330,000–390,000 Serbs.
Is it possible India might not have been reduced to abject subjugation by the "gun controlling" British if "pro-gun" Gandhi had prevailed?
It is mysterious why the Democratic Party would identify itself as being in support of violating an amendment of the Constitution, especially one specifically written to protect the American people and the country itself from undemocratic (tyrannical) governments? Isn't the Democratic Party in favor of democratic rights and opposed to unfettered government power? And didn't the previous experience with GW Bush help the Democratic Party understand the value of that amendment?
And that number does not include the untold numbers of deaths caused by prescription drugs in other ways than by taking them.
For while media covered the shooting deaths at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood as examples of gun violence that needed to be curtailed through gun control, they did not cover the fact that the shooters at the first two massacres were on drugs associated with psychotic rage, or that there is reason to believe that was true of the man at Fort Hood as well. How many post office killings if this true of?
Is Democratic Party silent around so many drug deaths because the drug industry pours millions into political campaigns? (Does the party, which was supposed to deliver single payer or at least a public option, not realize the drug companies were behind Obama gutting the public option from the health care bill, and inserting controls to prevent cheap non-drug forms of treatment?)
When the Democratic Party identifies with violating a constitutional amendment meant to protect democracy itself, and finds itself on the same side of the fence as "pro-gun control" Adolph Hitler and the British Empire, and at complete odds with "pro-gun" Mahatma Gandhi, something is terribly wrong.
Six things are plain: 1. guns are very far from being the biggest threat to people's lives in this country; 2. deaths by drugs, one of the leading causes of American deaths, is ignored as are gun massacres being triggered by drugs; 3. Gandhi believed it is crucial for a nation of people to maintain private weapons; 4. the removal of weapons by Hitler did not lead to a "safer" country; 5. the Second Amendment was written to protect the American people from tyranny (or empire) - an democratic and even a Gandhian purpose; and 6. the Democratic Party is caught siding with tyrants and imperialists and opposing the Bill of Rights and one of its own heroes.
Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to reconsider its position on the 2nd Amendment and its anti-gun stance.
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